Dear interested parties:   
   I saw this technical tidbit on seti.org. The name, Khayyam, is a famous name   
   in Persian history - The village of Khayyam is in the mountain in Northern   
   Iran. There is the source of underground tunnels which extend for hundreds of   
   miles. Omar Khayyam is    
   famous for his Rubbaiyyat, and the poet Coleridge wrote a poem about these   
   tunnels. They used night sky IR cooling for climate control.    
   =====================   
      
   I reproduce the Seti.org posting here:   
      
   Abstract: Sona Hosseini will report on progress toward development of a   
   tunable spatial heterodyne spectrometer (TSHS) at the fixed focus of the   
   Coudé Auxiliary Telescope (CAT) in the Shane Telescope at Lick Observatory   
   (Khayyam). Spatial Heterodyne    
   Spectrometer (SHS) instruments are a class of interferometric sensor capable   
   of providing a combination of large étendue, high resolving power (R=λ/dλ~   
   105) and wide field of view (FOV~0.5 degree) at Optical and NUV wavelengths in   
   a compact format.    
      
   The TSHS implementation addresses the bandpass limitation of the basic SHS   
   through controlled rotation of pilot mirrors in the interferometer. The use of   
   a single grating as both a dispersing and beam-splitting element in the all   
   reflective SHS greatly    
   relaxes the precision required in the alignment of the other optical elements   
   relative to a more typical scanning Fourier Transform Spectrometer and allows   
   the TSHS implementation to be accomplished with low cost commercial rotation   
   stages. The new    
   design builds on a previous design originally tested in 2007, and will address   
   several issues identified with the input beam, output imaging, and grating   
   efficiency. Here she will discuss the design considerations going into this   
   new system and the    
   initial results of the installation and testing of the TSHS and the future   
   plans.   
      
   Following completion of the ground based TSHS version (Khayyam), the longer   
   term goals of the TSHS project are to provide in flight testing on a sounding   
   rocket platform that Sona’s research group is developing and then ultimately   
   a translation to    
   satellite applications.    
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)